Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It is important the letters threatening repossession and the cases resulting in voluntary surrender are recorded in a separate category. They are not sustainable solutions. They result in the ending of the mortgage. One could regard them as a permanent solution from the point of view of the banks. However, the Department of Finance and the Central Bank should be adopting the same methodology. We can table written questions on the matter but I hope the presentation of the data of the Minister and the Central Bank will be uniform in terms of the bundles into which they are putting the different cases. Perhaps there are presentation issues, but either way it is important.

The Central Bank should not allow any threat of legal repossession to count as an instance of a sustainable solution. That is what happened, however, in its audits of quarters 1 and 2. In fact, in quarter 1, 60% of the sustainable solutions put forward by banks were in the repossession category, some of them being voluntary surrenders, while the figure for the second quarter was 55%. Moves to repossess should be recorded separately so that we have a clearer view of the genuinely sustainable solutions being offered. We are seeing increased activity levels within the banks, including on the split mortgage side and in terms of the economic concession by Ulster Bank, but it is still difficult to get a final decision from the banks when it comes to individual cases.

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